Jeffrey Goldberg explains why it can’t be done.
It’s insane to think that you can “negotiate” with someone whose primary goal is your destruction.
4 thoughts on “Making Peace With Hamas”
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Jeffrey Goldberg explains why it can’t be done.
It’s insane to think that you can “negotiate” with someone whose primary goal is your destruction.
Comments are closed.
Someone once said that you can always make a deal, so long as you don’t want the same thing. Except that Israel and Hamas DO want the same thing: control of that territory. I like negotiation as much as anyone, but it does seem to fit the one major exception pretty clearly.
Hamas’s founding document calls for the death of all Jews on Earth. Maybe they can compromise and only kill half of them.
How do you negotiate with someone whose going-in position is your extermination?
Here’s the approach I like:
“You stop trying to exterminate us, and we won’t exterminate you in self-defense.”
One of the big things I faulted George W. Bush for from the start was that he didn’t include Israel’s attackers as “terrorists” for the purposes of the Bush Doctrine.
I still remember when Israel liberated that paraplegic old fart of Hamas from jail as a gesture of goodwill. Afterwards they killed him with a gunship. Not content with that, soon afterwards they killed the leader of Hamas with a gunship as well. So Hamas is used to this shit and I doubt they will concede. It is easy to brand Hamas as terrorists, since they are terrorists, but forget the bombing of King David Hotel by the predecessors of the Likud party. Terrorism, guerilla warfare, asymmetric warfare, whatever you want to name it, is the only means of armed combat the Palestinians can use, since they lost their conventional armed forces a long time ago. I almost bet if we were talking about Sinn Féin instead of Hamas some people’s reactions here would be a bit different.